adventures in the new and the old

Tag Archives: Release Management

I am going to subtitle this post “the missing manual” because I spent quite a bit of time troubleshoothing how this should all work.

Microsoft provides a bunch of useful information on how to deploy from Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to different targets, including Azure Virtual Machines.

Updated Nov 2017: it looks like Microsoft has updated their documentation site making the above link invalid. Take a look at the bottom of this post to see how you can use Release Management to deploy the package and run the PowerShell I talk about.

In an ideal world I wouldn’t be using VMs at all, but for my current particular use case I have to use VMs so the above (linked) approach worked.

The approach sounds good but I ran into a few sharp edges that I thought I would document here (and hopefully the source documentation will be updated to reflect this in due course).

Preparing deployment targets

Azure FQDNs

Note: Please see my update at the bottom of this post before reading this section. While you can use IP addresses (if you make them static) it’s worth configuring test certs with the FQDN.

I thought I’d do the right thing by configuring the Azure IP of my hosts to have a full FQDN rather than just an IP address.

As I found out this is not a good idea.

The main issue you will run into is the generated certs on target hosts only have the hostname in them (i.e. azauhost01) rather than the full public FQDN (i.e. azauhost01.australiaeast.cloudapp.azure.com).

When the Release Management infrastructure tries to connect to a host this cert mismatch causes a fatal error. I didn’t spend much time troubleshooting so decided to revert to use of IP addresses only.

When using dynamic IP addresses the first Release Management action “Azure Deployment:Select Resource Group action” is important as it allows for discovery of all VMs and their IPs (i.e. no hardcoding required). This apprach does mean, however, you need to consider how you group VMs into Resource Groups to allow any VM in the Resource Group to be used as the deployment target.

Local permissions

I was running my deployments to non-Domain joined Windows 2012 R2 server instances with local administrative accounts and had opened the necessary port in the NSG rules to allow WinRM into the servers from the VSTS infrastructure.

Everything looked good on deployment until PowerShell execution on the target hosts resulted in errors due to permissions. As it turns out the error message was actually useful in resolving this problem 🙂

In order to move beyond this error I had to prepare each target host by running these commands at an admin command prompt on the host:

winrm quickconfig
Enable-PSRemoting

We could drop these into a DSC module and run that way if we wanted to make this repeatable across new hosts.

Wait! Where did my PowerShell script go?

If you follow the instructions provided by Microsoft you need to add a deployment Powershell script (actually a DSC module) to your Web App (their example uses “ConfigureWebserver.ps1” for the filename).

There is one issue with this approach – the build step to package the Web App actually ends up bundling the PowerShell inside of a deployment zip which means once the files are copied to your target VM the PowerShell can’t be invoked.

The fix for this is to add an additional build step that copies the PowerShell to the drops folder on VSTS which means the PowerShell will be transferred to the target VM.

Your final build definition should look like the below

and the Copy Files task should be configured like this (note below that /Deploy is the folder in my solution that contains the PowerShell I’ve included for deployment purposes):

Once you have done this you will find that the script is now available in the VSTS drops folder and can be copied to the VMs which allows you to execute it via the Release Management action.

Wrapping up

Once I had these changes in place and had made some minor path / project name tweaks to match my project I could run the process end-to-end.

The one final item I’ll call out here is the default deployment location of the solution on the target VM ends up being the wwwroot of your inetpub folder with a subfolder named ProjectName_deploy. If you map this to an Application in IIS you should be good to go :).

Update – 8 December 2016

After I’d been running happily for a while my Release started failing. It turns out my target VMs were cycled and moved to different public IP addresses. As the WinRM HTTP certificate had the old IP address in the remote calls failed.

As mentioned above, Microsoft has reorganised some of their content and seems to have retired the post I used originally. The missing piece to my post here is how does Release Management (RM) fit into the picture – see below for what my RM process looks like. The highlighted Task is the one that executes the PowerShell on the VM – details below as well!

SharePoint has always been a bit a challenge when it comes to structured ALM and developer practices which is something Microsoft partially addressed with the release of SharePoint and Visual Studio 2010. Deploying and building solutions for SharePoint 2013 pretty much retains most of the IP from 2010 with the noted deprecation of Sandbox Solutions (this means they’ll be gone in SharePoint vNext).

As part of the project I’m leading at Kloud at the moment we are rebuilding an Intranet so it runs on SharePoint Online 2013 so I wanted to share some of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) processes we’ve been using.

Packaging

Most of the work we have been doing to date has leveraged existing features within the SharePoint core – we have, however, spent time utilising the Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint templates to package our customisations so they can be moved between multiple environments. SharePoint Online still provides support for Sandboxed Solutions and we’ve found that they provide a convenient way to deploy elements that are not developed as Apps. Designer packages can also be exported and edited in Visual Studio and produce a re-deployable package (which result in Sandboxed Solutions).

Powershell

At the time of writing, the number of Powershell Commandlets for managing SharePoint Online are substantially less those for on-premise. If you need to modify any element below a Site Collection you are pretty much forced to write custom tooling or perform the tasks manually – we have made a call in come cases to build tooling using the Client Side Object Model (CSOM) or to perform tasks manually.

Development Environment

Microsoft has invested some time in the developer experience around SharePoint Online and now provides you with free access to an “Office 365 Developer Site” which gives you a single-license Office 365 environment in which to develop solutions. The General Availability of Office 365 Wave 15 (the 2013 suite) sees these sites only being available for businesses holding enterprise (E3 or E4) licenses. Anyone else will need to utilise a 30 day trial tenant.

We have had each team member setup their own site and develop solutions locally prior to rolling them into our main deployment. Packaging and deployment is obviously key here as we need to be able to keep the developer instances in sync with each other and the easiest way to achieve that is with WSPs that can be redeployed as required.

One other item we have done around development is to utilise an on-premise setup in a VM to provide developers with a more rapid development experience in some cases (and more transparent troubleshooting). As you mostly stick to the SharePoint CSOM a lot of your development these days resides in JavaScript which means you shouldn’t hit any snags in relying in on-premise / full-trust features in your delivered solutions.

Note that the Office 365 Developer Site is a single-license environment which means you can’t do multi-user testing or content targeting. That’s where test environments come into play!

Test Environment

The best way to achieve a more structured ALM approach with Office 365 is to leverage an intermediate test environment – the easiest way for anyone to achieve this is to register for a trial Office 365 tenant – while only technically available for 30 days this still provides you with the ability to test prior to deploying to your production environment.

Once everything is tested and good to go into production you’re already in a position to know the steps involved in deployment!

As you can see – it’s still not a perfect world for SharePoint ALM, but with a little work you can get to a point where you are at least starting to enforce a little rigour around build and deployment.

Let me start by saying that if you think this going to be a post about how bad most “v1” software is then you will be sorely disappointed and you should move on.

What I am going to talk about is fairly similar to Scott Hanselman’s blog on semantic versioning and the reasons you should be using versioning in your software.

Care Factor

Firstly, you may ask yourself, “why should I care about versioning?”

This is a fair question.

Perhaps you don’t need to care about it, but I suspect more accurately you’ve never needed to care about it.

Through the custom software projects I’ve been involved in my career I’ve seen pretty much any combination you care to think of of how software can be built, released and maintained. In the majority of cases proper versioning has taken a back seat to almost every other aspect of delivery (assuming versioning was even thought of at all). Certainly the discussions I’ve often participated in around exactly what version was deployed where have tended to be fairly excruciating as they have typically arisen when there is a problem that needs root cause analysis and ultimately a fix.

Examples of bad practice I’ve seen are:

Using file create date / time to determine which assembly copy was newer (of course this approach was undocumented).

Someone screwed up the versioning so the newer builds had an older version number (and nobody ever bothered to fix it).

Everything is versioned 1.0.0.0 with a mix of “F5” developer machine builds and build server builds being deployed randomly to fix issues. This one resulted in “race conditions” where an assembly may get updated from more than one source (and you never knew which one).

New build server = zero out all counters = ground-hog day versioning (or “what was old is now new”).

New branch, old version number scheme. Builds with parallel version numbers. Oops.

Version 5 of ReSharper had assembly (and MSI) versions that bore a tenuous relationship to the actual official “version”. The 5.1.2 release notes have an interesting responses thread which I would put as recommended reading on how versioning affects end users.

The bottom line is that versioning (when used properly) allows us to identify a unique set of features and configurations that were in use at any given time. In .Net it also gives us access to one of the more powerful features of the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) as we can deploy multiple versions of the same assembly side-by-side!

If this seems self-explanatory that’s because it is.

Still With Me?

What I’ve written so far could apply equally to any technology used in software delivery but now I’m going to cover what I think is the root cause of the lack of care about versioning in the .Net landscape:

It’s too easy to not care about version with .Net.

Thanks to Microsoft we get a free AssemblyInfo file along for the ride in each new project we create. It wonderfully provides us with this template:

The problem is the last two lines. I wonder how many people bother to even look at this file?

Let’s try a little experiment – how many matches for the default entry for version in the AssemblyInfo file can we find on GitHub? Oh, about 62,000.

Now this isn’t necessarily a problem but it indicates the scale of the challenge! To be fair to those on GitHub, all/some/none of those matches may well be overridden on a build server (I hope so!) using one of the multitude of techniques available (if you’d like a few options let me know and I’ll do another post on this).

Let’s solve the problem by deleting those two lines – sounds like a plan? Get rid of the pesky version number completely. Does the application still compile? Yup.

So what version do we get left with? Let’s take a look at the resulting details.

What The?! Version 0.0.0.0?! We’ve made things even more broken than they already were. That’s not a strategy!

Some Suggestions

Fairly obviously we are somewhat stuck with what we have here – it is not illegal at compile time to not have an explicit version number defined (resulting in 0.0.0.0). We can’t modify the default behaviour of csc.exe or vbc.exe to enforce an incremented version number…

Assuming you’re using good practices and have a build server running your builds you can drop in a couple of unit tests that will allow you to ensure any compiled assembly doesn’t have either of our problematic versions. Here’s a super simple example of how to do this. Note this needs to run on your build server – these tests will fail on developer machines if you aren’t checking in updated AssemblyInfo files (which I would recommend against).

Remember to update the tests as you increment major / minor version numbers.

The goal is to ensure your build server will not emmit assemblies that have version numbers that match those held in source control. We’re doing this to enforce deployment of server builds and make it obviously a different version number for a developer build. I personally set builds to never check updated AssemblyInfo files back into source control for this very reason.

Make sure you *do* label builds in source control however. If you don’t you may have challenges in the longer term in being able to retrieve older versions unless you have a very large “drops” storage location :).

Early on in planning your project you should also decide on a version number scheme and then stick to it. Make sure it is documented and supported in your release management practices and that everyone on the team understands how it works. It will also ease communication with your stakeholders when you have known version numbers to discuss (no more “it will be in the next release”).

Finally, don’t let the version number hide away. Ensure it displayed somewhere in the application you’re building. It doesn’t need to be on every page or screen but it should be somewhere that a non-Admin user can easily view.

So, there we go, hopefully a few handy tips that will have you revisting the AssemblyInfo files in your projects.

Powershell has been with us now since late 2006 but my experience is that widespread understanding and use of it is still very restricted within the .Net developer community. If you’re a Windows administrator, operator or release manager I’m sure you’re all over it. If you’re job description doesn’t fit in one of those three groups and you’re not inclined to understand how your software will be deployed or operated then the chances are you don’t know much about Powershell.

I have to say that Powershell’s syntactic differences to the “standard” C# most developers would know is an easy place to start disliking working with it (for example it’s not “==” for equals it’s “-eq” and null becomes $null). I say to those developers: it’s worth persevering because you stand to gain a lot once you get your head around it.

If you need to deploy something to test or debug it or you have an awkward environment with which to work with (I’m looking at you SharePoint 2010) then you will save yourself a lot of time by scripting out as much manual stuff as you can. Your release managers and ops teams will also love you if you can provide scripts that allow them to deploy without needing to perform a massive number of manual steps (if you ever want to get to the Continuous Deployment nirvana you can’t really avoid working with a scripting language).

I’m currently working on a project that includes the need for 84 IIS Websites in a load balanced environment. These sites follow a pattern – think I want to manually configure 84 IIS instances? Right. I have a Powershell script that will setup each site including a new local windows login for the Application Pool, setup the Application Pool (including user), create the Website (including folders and holding page and association with the Application Pool) and set all various host headers I need. Finally it will grant my WebDeploy user rights to deploy to the site. I’ll put a version of that script up in a future post.

On the same project we’ve used Powershell and the Amazon Web Services .Net SDK to provide tooling for use to push database backups from SQL Server to S3 (what, no RDS yet for SQL Server????) That’s another trick – you get full access to .Net in Powershell simply by pulling in a reference to the right .Net assembly.

Anyway, I could bang on about why you need to learn Powershell if you haven’t, but I’ll pick up this thread in a future post when I provide a sample script for setting up IIS sites.

On a side note I read about the death of Adam Yauch (MCA) from the Beastie Boys on May 4th – he’d been battling cancer for the last three years and most certainly didn’t deserve to put down the mic at 47. This one’s for him.